Could be good news:

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/nation/3819791.html
High court adding its voice to fight over immigration The issue: Can workers sue their company under RICO for using illegal employees?

By PATTY REINERTCopyright 2006 Houston Chronicle Washington Bureau
WASHINGTON -
Lawmakers are trying to rewrite immigration laws. The White House is pushing a guest worker plan. Immigrants are demonstrating in the streets and federal officials are staging the largest workplace raids in history to round up the undocumented.

Now the U.S. Supreme Court will weigh in on immigration.

The justices will hear arguments today in a Georgia case that will determine whether employees can use the 1970 Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations law to sue companies that hire illegal immigrants to drive down wages for legal workers.

The RICO law was created as a tool to go after mobsters and drug kingpins, but its use has been expanded to others.

The case brought by employees of carpet maker Mohawk Industries Inc. alleges the company conspired with labor recruiters in Brownsville, Texas, to hire recently arrived illegal immigrants and send them to Georgia. If the employees win at the high court, they will be able to sue Mohawk under RICO in federal court, where they could collect triple damages.

The company claims it cannot be sued under RICO because it does not qualify as a separate "enterprise" under the language of the law.

Could be significant"If the Supreme Court sides with the (workers) in this case, there is no doubt that we will see many more civil RICO cases filed on a broad range of subject matters, not just immigration," said Karen Hirschman, a partner at the Vinson & Elkins law firm's Dallas office who specializes in complex civil litigation.

The last major immigration reform law, passed in 1986, was supposed to crack down on employers that hire undocumented workers, but the law was never strictly enforced. In 1996, RICO was expanded to cover companies that knowingly hire illegal workers by using their own employees or outside contractors to recruit them.

Using RICO, employees have sued employers they accuse of looking the other way when presented with fake work documents and, in some cases, traveling to the border to recruit undocumented immigrants.

Four legal workers — Shirley Williams, Gale Pelfrey, Bonnie Jones and Lora Sisson — sued Mohawk in 2004. They are seeking a retroactive wage increase for all legal workers at the company from January 1999 to the present.

The workers claim Mohawk paid employees and outside recruiters to find illegal workers along the Texas-Mexico border. The lawsuit also alleges Mohawk hid the workers from immigration authorities and rehired some under fake names after they had been caught with false documents.
White House supportChicago lawyer Howard Foster, an immigration control activist, plans to argue on behalf of the plaintiffs that the alleged behavior is what Congress had in mind when it added immigration violations to the list of crimes that fall under RICO.

The Bush administration is siding with the workers and will share argument time with Foster.

Mohawk denies any wrongdoing and says it provides competitive pay and benefits to its employees. The company argued in two lower courts that it cannot be sued under RICO because it and its recruiters do not qualify as a separate "enterprise" under the law.

Mohawk lost attempts in lower courts to avoid the lawsuit. Its last chance is a Supreme Court decision in its favor.

Company attorney Carter Phillips of Washington contends that if the justices agree with the lower courts, they will make companies vulnerable to all kinds of costly RICO lawsuits for relatively minor business disputes.